Hey Ron Paul Fans: Hope You Know That If America Stopped Being The World's Policeman, America's Economy Would Collapse

Ron Paul doesn't just think the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan are a mistake. He's an isolationist: he
thinks America shouldn't be the world's policeman. He thinks
America shouldn't have troops abroad and shouldn't use its
military except in cases of self-defense.

Here's the problem: this would wreck the US economy, and the
world economy.

And isolationists in general, and Ron Paul in particular, don't seem to grasp
that.

Here's the thing: when isolationists talk about America being the
"world's policeman," they think about foreign wars like
Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. That's what mobilizes people's
imagination for very obvious reasons: it's where people die. But
foreign wars are by far the least important part of
America's duty as the world's policeman.

What matters about America being the world's policeman, and
America's troops being abroad, is all the troops that
don't do any fighting.

From bases in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the US military
protects the world's shipping lanes, making sure the clockwork of
the global economy runs smoothly and goods and oil can be shipped
to and back. This is the part of the global American military
footprint that actually matters, not the wars.

These wars may be very bad ideas, but Ron Paul and his ilk don't just want to end
those wars. They want to end America's global military hegemony.

And it should be obvious by now that this would be like taking a
wrecking ball to the American economy.

Everyone takes it as a granted that you can load a ship full of
oil in Saudi Arabia and take it to China and not have anyone
steal it. And that you can load a ship full of toys and iPhones
in China and take it to the US and not have anyone steal it. And
so on.

But even a cursory look at world history shows that this is
exceptional in the history of the world. The reason why this
happens is because there is a benign, global military hegemon
which ensures the security of the world's shipping lanes, on
which the globalized world economy, and therefore the U.S.
economy, depends.

Every era of successful globalization, from Pericles to Queen
Victoria, has involved a naval hegemon to ensure the security of
shipping, and therefore commerce. The hegemon provides this
public good that lets other, smaller actors free-ride, not
because it's in the thrall of neocons, but because it directly
benefits from strong, safe international trade.

And it's everything libertarians abbhor: basically everyone
except the U.S. is getting a free lunch. Saudi kings and Greek
shipping magnates don't pay for the security that the US
provides. And the U.S. is paying for everyone else's security.
But actually, the U.S. gets a lot more out of it than it spends,
because it gets to be at the center of safe, global free
trade.

There's no way around it: without this trade subsidy that the
U.S. provides the world, which costs $700 billion per year in
military budget but probably brings back trillions in value to
the U.S. economy, and trillions more to the world, the cost of
everything would automatically rise, especially the cost of oil
and the cost of anything that's on store shelves. It's not hard
to see the effect this would have on the global, and U.S.
economy. It would make the Smoot-Hawley Act look like the Doha
Round. It would have exactly the effect of something libertarians
claim to detest: a giant global tarriff.

Europe would be the likeliest candidate, except that its defense
capabilities have shrunk to an extent where it's impossible. The
United States has eleven carrier groups, and "Europe" (because
"Europe" is a geographical construct, not a political one) has
four. Europe's carriers are all much smaller than the smallest
U.S. carrier. Europe has only one nuclear carrier, meaning a
carrier that can stay at sea for a long period of time. Europe
doesn't have military and naval bases across all the global
shipping lanes, mostly just in its former colonies in Africa.
Even if Europe a) got a unified political executive and b) took
up its defense spending to the level of the U.S., it would take
decades for it to actually build the ships and the infrastructure
it would take. And meanwhile the world economy burns. (Not to
mention that given its current fiscal position, it would have to
do it at the price of terrible austerity, which would also wreck
the global economy.)

China is an even more risible alternative. For all the talk of
China's rising clout, it doesn't have anything near a
"blue-water" navy that can project power globally. Its first and
only aircraft carrier, recently launched with much hype and
fretting, is a 20-year-old Soviet diesel-powered hand-me-down. So
even leaving aside the obvious problems with just handing over
responsibility for the global economy to a Communist
dictatorship, it's just not possible.

The same applies to India: for all their sheer size, which makes
them important political and economic actors, they remain very
poor countries that just don't have the technological and
economic capacities to build a military with global-reach.

Well, maybe no one country can replace the United States, but
maybe everyone could chip in: Europe and the U.S. would ensure
the security of the Atlantic, India of South Asia, China that of
East Asia (which will certainly go down well in Taiwan and Japan)
and so forth. Except that history teaches us that these
"multipolar" zones of influences lead to one thing: war. In the
17th century, Britain, France and Spain fought endlessly for
naval superiority. Only when Britain became most powerful did
peace arrive and global trade begin in earnest. Same thing with
the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. And so on.

But let's imagine an ideal libertarian scenario. Let's imagine
that instead of a specific country, or even set of countries,
global security is provided by private actors through some
combination of mercenaries and insurance. By definition this
would still raise the cost of global trade dramatically. Those
mercenaries and insurance providers would still have to be paid,
and those costs would still be reflected in the price of
shipping. So it would still amount to a huge global tariff.

All but the most hardcore libertarians realize that government
has a role in providing for the public good, things that benefit everyone but that it doesn't
make sense for any individual actor to pay for. Like it or not,
global American military hegemony is a public good. The fact that
the U.S. military is so much more powerful than anyone else
(indeed, everyone else combined) means that global trade is
safer, and thereby cheaper, than it's ever been before, which
benefits the global economy and the U.S. directly and
tremendously.

When libertarians and isolationists talk about the U.S. being
"the world's policeman", they talk in terms of a) politics and b)
foreign wars. But the parts that matter are about a) economics
and b) preventing wars. What matters in policing a city isn't the
SWAT team, it's the cops who walk the beat and take care of the
riff-raff so that the SWAT team only has to come out once in a
while. And when the SWAT team raids the wrong house, that's
terrible and we should do something about that, but it doesn't
mean we need to disband the police force.

We're all for blasting illegal, unwinnable, endless foreign wars
of choice. We're all for smashing the national security state
that treats grandma like a terrorist if she wants to board a
flight. We're all for howling at the insidious and wasteful
military-industrial complex, and cutting the unsustainable
Pentagon budget.

That's what gets Ron Paul attention, but that's not what he
wants. What he and other isolationists want is to end American
global military hegemony. And facts are stubborn: like it or not,
doing that would wreck the global and U.S. economy.